Custom Search

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Regional Banks Break Down

Wilbur Ross Sees ‘Huge’ Commercial Real Estate Crash (Update3): "Billionaire investor Wilbur L. Ross Jr,, said today that U.S. is in the beginning of a "huge crash in commercial real estate."

On Friday 9 banks failed and were seized by the FDIC, the largest number of failures since the crisis began. Included was California National Bank, the fourth-largest U.S. bank failure this year.

Banks are expected to come under additional pressure. In a speech on October 14th, 2009 Sheila Bair said revealed the following:

The FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) is out of money: "The FDIC estimates that as of September 30, 2009, both the fund balance and the reserve ratio were negative after reserving for projected losses over the next 12 months, though our cash position remained positive."

The FDIC is expecting a lot more bank failures: "The negative fund balance reflects, in part, an increase in provisioning for anticipated failures. The FDIC projects that, over the period 2009 through 2013, the fund could incur approximately $100 billion in failure costs. The FDIC projects that most of these costs will occur in 2009 and 2010."

The FDIC is raising money by charging the banks more: "For the first quarter of 2009, the FDIC raised rates by 7 basis points. The FDIC also imposed a special assessment as of June 30, 2009 of 5 basis points of each institution's assets minus Tier 1 capital, with a cap of 10 basis points of an institution's regular assessment base. On September 22, the FDIC again took action to increase assessment rates -- the board decided that effective January 1, 2011, rates will uniformly increase by 3 basis points."

With CRE imploding even as delinquencies and defaults among home owners continues to rise, and with the FDIC expecting more failures is it any wonder that regional banks have started roll over?

blog comments powered by Disqus